KashFlow review

KashFlow

KashFlow tied with Less Accounting as the most applicable to our requirements – both at 97%.  They scored well in different areas, however, which means that where Less accounting was weak (payment gateways), KashFlow is very strong – and vice verse.

Overall, KashFlow is about as close to ideal as you could wish for – but there are a couple of gotchas.

KashFlow is directly aimed at being a complete QuickBooks replacement.  It does bank account reconciliation, expense management admirably well.  There’s a comprehensive reports section and pretty much a feature-for-feature replacement for QuickBooks.

I played with the csv import for client data – officially in Beta release – but it worked a treat and handled the 4,000 or so records I threw at it.  I’m not sure if we’d ever use it now that I’m leaning towards doing all that data exchange stuff via the API on an ongoing basis, rather than batch imports.

KashFlow has a full API which, again, looks to be comprehensive and lots of nice little touches which would be valuable to our business.  For example, you can bcc a copy of every invoice emailed out to a single email address – great for backup and archiving.  KashFlow also has some scheduled backup options whereby you can receive a full data backup by email each week – in addition to manual and ad-hoc backups.

Invoices are emailed as PDF attachments but you can also create the email text using wild-card matches so you can do something like

“Dear #, Here’s your Invoice Number #, total outstanding is #, please pay by #”

For extra security, API access to the application can be limited by IP address – a nice feature and one that typifies what is certainly a robust and thoroughly well-engineered application.

KashFlow’s trump card, though, is the variety of payment processors integrated right inside the application.  In addition to the obligatory PayPal button, there’s offerings from Iridium, SecureHosting and Protx.

KashFlow are even working on integrating WorldPay – which might well work out nicely for us as we migrate clients away from WorldPay towards whichever payment processor we choose.

I did a fair bit of playing with the integration between KashFlow and Iridium (you can set up a test account with Iridium too) and in a short while I was processing transactions using test credit card data (available from Iridium at the back of their integration documentation).  If you’ve ever tried to integrate WorldPay transactions – you’ll know that this is nothing short of a miracle. 

It worked, it was easy and it really demonstrated to me the advantages of having a finance system complete with a tightly integrated credit card processor.  Here’s how a typical transaction works with KashFlow/Iridium:

1. Raise an invoice for the client and email it to them
2. Client calls in to pay by credit card
3. We click on the Iridium logo on his Invoice and take card details over the phone
4. Without leaving the KashFlow application, credit card is verified, payment taken, current account balance incremented, invoice reconciled as paid & a statement is emailed to the client.

A process that can currently take us anywhere between 10 and 20 minutes can be achieved in 2.  By automating this completely via the API and using recurring billing, we can reduce processing time, for at least 60% of our invoices, to zero.

Actually, things didn’t quite go that smoothly – but it was an instructive experience which reflects very well on the people and systems in place at KashFlow and Iridium.  Initially, KashFlow didn’t have the ability to transact with Iridium in Euros.  within an hour or so of raising this with KashFlow, it was added – but didn’t work.  Within 24 hours, KashFlow had sorted the problem and it worked fine.

Again, if you’ve ever tried to resolve any kind of a problem with WorldPay – you know how rare and refreshing this is.  Really, I was stunned that it even happened at all – let alone happened so fast.

I’ve gushed enough about KashFlow – let’s have a look at where it’s not so strong. 

It’s one of the harder applications to navigate around – not because there are so many options – but because the navigation is not intuitive.

See the pink bar above the blue bar in the screen-shot above?  They swap positions when you click them – I have no idea why, but the effect is that the thing you just clicked changes position – so you have to hunt around a bit to find it again.  Not a huge problem, I figured it out and it wouldn’t stop me from using the application but it lacks the feeling of ease of use that many of the other applications have.

This isn’t a problem for us yet – but it could be – and it already is for some KashFlow users.  There’s no setting for different user permission levels within KashFlow.  This means the person issuing invoices can also see your P&L and knows the salary of each employee.  For a smaller organisation this probably isn’t too much of an issue but it’s a show-stopper for some businesses.

Last, is the one that’s causing me the biggest problem now – a fairly rigid invoice template.  It is possible to customise the template to a degree – but not enough to accommodate our newly-discovered requirement for sending invoices in different languages.

Conclusion

KashFlow has it all – almost.  It’s got the trickiest bits solved – payment processing – but for us it’s lacking the invoice template flexibility.  I’m not sure yet whether this rules it out completely or whether there’s a hybrid solution.  I also need to do some more research into recurring billing and some more research into the payment processors integrated inside KashFlow to be able to make a final judgement.

Next Step: A review of Less Accounting

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